Darwin did poorly in school, and so could not secure employment following his graduation from divinity school. However, he was able to secure a position as ship's naturalist aboard the H. M.S. Beagle. The Beagle Link
But was Darwin intelligent? I don’t know but his autobiography quotes one particular beetle hunt in detail:-
"I will give a proof of my zeal: one day on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth. Alas it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out, which was lost, as well as the third one".
According to Moore's latest research, eugenics was the natural child, so to speak, of Charles Darwin's personal anxiety. The father of evolutionary theory profoundly feared the results of inbreeding in his immediate family, says Moore, and he passed those fears on to his children and ultimately his country… …The reproductive relationships in the Darwin family are enough to make your head spin. Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood. His sister also married one of her Wedgewood cousins and two other Wedgewood cousins married their Darwin first cousins. In all there were four first-cousin marriages constituting what Moore calls the Darwoodian pedigree.
Though it wasn't uncommon for first cousins to marry in the 19th century, "Charles worried about this for a number of reasons," says Moore. "He knew from his contact with animal and plant breeders that inbreeding can cause both bad and good things to happen. It's clear that from the very beginning of his engagement, he was keen to interpret their relationship, and later the children who would be born, as natural history phenomena."
Darwin observed his children as closely as he monitored "apes in the London Zoo," to see which inherited traits they displayed. Sure enough, all of them fell victim to his own defective digestive condition. His eldest daughter died at age 10 with severe gastrointestinal problems, and one after another, the remaining seven children fell ill at about the same age. "Over a period of 15 years, Darwin discovered how heredity works when first cousins marry," says Moore.
Darwin's five surviving sons became actively involved in the eugenics movement. His son George compiled statistics on the offspring of first-cousin marriages and also checked lunatic asylums for traits of inferior human beings. His youngest son Horace, the sickliest of the lot, started an engineering company to make anthropometric instruments used in measuring body parts to assess genetic quality. And both sons worked closely with Francis Galton, founder of the eugenics movement in the 1880s, which was hailed as "a new basis of moral obligation." Link
One hundred and fifty years ago, according to Gillespie (1979), most naturalists accepted the idea of common ancestry, but they differed on how new forms arose. The Establishment at Oxford (Buckland, for instance) evidently thought that God occasionally remodeled an existing form into a perfectly adapted new type (Rupke, 1983). The Radical Materialists such as Grant and Knox followed Lamarck in considering matter itself energized with an intrinsic tendency for unifomm development (Desmond, 1989). The followers of German Naturphilosophie (Richard Owen, for instance) held the theory that autonomous extra-material archetypes shaped lineages progressively into their own images (Desmond, 1982). All the schools (with the exception of Louis Agassis) viewed fossil sequences as demonstrations of common descent. They differed on the nature of the power that shaped biological form, but not on whether things shared common ancestry. One further note: although they differed in their philosophies of nature, each school had both Christian and non-Christian adherents.
According to historian James Moore (1982), however, around 1840 a new movement of young middle-class reformers calling themselves "Naturalists" appeared. This group as young adults typically changed their creed from Christianity (which they felt was morally bankrupt) to one based on "Nature." They were "poets and lawyers, doctors and manufacturers, novelists and naturalists, engineers and politicians." The group included such well-known individuals as George Eliot, Herbert Spencer, Matthew Arnold, Francis Galton, J. A. Froude, G. H. Lewes, Charles Bray, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Tyndall, F. W. Newman, A. H. Clough, Harriet Martineau, F. P. Cobbe, and, of course, T. H. Huxley. Moore shows that the central feature of this new creed was the redefinition of human nature, society, order, law, evil, progress, purpose, authority, and nature itself in terms of the Naturalists' particular view of Nature, as opposed to the Christian Scriptures. In fact, they tended to attack the Christian Scriptures as the true source of societal evil. God, if he existed, was to be known only through the Nature which he made. Thus, according to Moore (1982) and Young (1980), "positivism" was not primarily a methodology for science, but a religious movement that sought to replace the cultural dominance of the Established Church.
Charles Darwin launched his theory of biological change in this context. He proposed a mechanism for the appearance of new forms that did not depend on any pre-existing or exterior shaping forces. The environment became the only needed constraint. It was a theory of strategic importance for the Naturalists, particularly for the "X" club, Huxley's "Young Guard" party in science.
The Naturalists succeeded. The "Young Guard" used the trappings of religion to sacralize their "science." Three centuries of cooperation between science and religion were forgotten and their history was rewritten as "warfare." Hymns to nature were sung at popular lectures before the giving of "lay sermons" by a member of Galton's "Scientific Priesthood." Museums were built to resemble cathedrals, and following frantic string-pulling by Lubbock (a member of the "X" club) Charles Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey. The new church was established (Moore, 1982).
If the professionally validated "scientist" is viewed as the only one who can adequately understand nature, and if Nature has replaced Scripture as the source of moral and teleological truth, ipso facto the scientist has replaced the priest. Thus, the "professional" position at stake was as much the pulpit as the lectern.
It is a fact that God is continuously being publicly discussed by very well-known scientists- just read Gould, Dawkins, Hull, Provine, Wilson, Simpson, Futyama, Sagan, Hawking, and others. From a nineteenth century perspective, books like The Blind Watchmaker (Dawkins, 1986) and Wonderful Life (Gould, 1989) are simply Bridgewater treatises such as Paley, Owens, and Roget wrote, works in which up-to-date science is used for the task of world-view apologetics.
Is it true that biology cannot live without evolution, that (to quote Dobzbansky) "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution"?
First, is it the unifying theory in modern biology? Why not cell theory? or molecular energetics? or hierarchy theory? or ecosystem dynamics? or cybernetic control theory? The fact that a theory applies to all living things does not mean that it is the essential organizing framework. In reality, what is probably meant by evolution in this "unifying" context is simply philosophical materialism, but that is general philosophy rather than science.
If materialist neuroscientists are correct that the brain secretes thoughts the way the liver does bile, why are they my thoughts? Bile, after all, is a chemical concoction produced in that metabolic factory called the liver; but thoughts are not chemicals, just thoughts. "How is it," as Thomas Huxley once put it, "that anything so remarkable as a state of consciousness comes about as a result of irritating nervous tissue?" Source
Source
Merry Christmas!
(The Paradoxes of Christianity)
and Happy New Year!
This is not so profound as it is profuse; few among the many actually brute about the orts and bits that buttress the contemporary convential wisdom; it's so much easier to accept the word of "experts."