Darwin's "The Origin of Species"?

Yah, any day now North Korea, Myanmar, Syria, will all be singing kumbaya and tearing down their versions of the Berlin Wall. Any day now....




Shoddy history. Here's a brief and slightly less shoddy one; Separation of Church and State -- in the Constitution (aka 1770's). Origin of the Species, 1890's. At the point there was not a distinct schism between Christian and Scientific world-view; it was all of a one as "Naturalism."

Fundamentalist revival in the US goes back to about turn of the century, roughly 1910, making possible the Scopes trial in the 1920's. Fundies lurk in the shadows until courted by Republican party, leading to recent rise in power and recent challenging of texts that had been accepted since the 50's and 60's. Reaction to that rise, newly visible atheist community et al, dating back maybe ten years.

Basically, Evolution has been part of science since a time when most religious had no more problem with it than the Pope does now. The change has been a recent rise of politically connected fundamentalists who tried to drive some elements of science from the classroom in a transparent attempt at proselytizing for their own, and were largely beaten back.





You've researched? It is to laugh. Show me the papers you've had published in Nature. Show me the fossils you've collected. Show me your genetic sequencer, and the samples you used of mitochondrial DNA. Heck...show me you can even tell your Cambrian from your Upper Cretaceous!

Say, tell me where does the growing power of Muslim nations, or the rapidly increasing populations of Buddhists, fit in? Are they part of this Darwinian revolution you speak of, or are they part of the old guard of old, conservative religions?


I think you turned off your TV too late. Billy Swaggart (or was it Ken Hamm?) already got to you.

"The notion of species is simply a 17th centuary convention of biological classification condemed by Linnaeus because when you visually look around with no awareness of geological time you do seem to see distinct plants and animals but now that we are aware of such things as bacterial transfer of genes from one organism to another,...we realise that the apparent fixity of the species is an illusion and that actually there is only a "gene swarm" on the planet...."

Terrence McKenna