Free Republic

President Trump’s suggestion that he would like to see the country begin reopening by Easter, which is April 12, has met with a lot of skepticism. But it may not be that far-fetched. While almost all of the news about the coronavirus pandemic has been negative, there are reasons to think things won’t be as bad as many of the news outlets and talking heads are predicting. Here are some of them:

A paleontologist testified in the Dover school board trial about how fossils connect species.The ancestor of the whale and its first cousin the hippopotamus walked the Earth for 40 million years, munching on plants, before dying out in the ice ages. Known as the anthracotheres, it became extinct 50 to 60 million years ago, but not before its evolutionary tree diverged — the whale forging into the oceans, the hippopotamus to the African swamps. Kevin Padian, a University of California-Berkeley paleontologist, told the story of the whale’s journey, along with the travels of its closest living relative, in U.S....

In all our contemporary conflicts over the teaching of evolution in schools, there’s one question that nobody asks: To what does the embrace of Darwinism lead? Historian Richard Weikart explores that topic in a book called From Darwinto Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. Despite that provocative title, Weikart is no sensationalist. He’s not out to prove that Hitler and the Nazi party were directly inspired by Charles Darwin’s theories. But what Weikart does demonstrate, through exhaustive research, is that Darwin’s ideas about the origin of species helped create a culture that devalued human life. And in that...