Charles Darwin has started a blog. It is welcome, even essential, reading. From his first post ,"More than a marble Darwin could stand", written in the Natural History Museum cafe (photo at blog):
"I overheard that some American has had the nerve to make a film called Expelled traducing natural selection and championing something called ‘intelligent design’. I thought we had settled Mr Paley’s watchmaker nonsense in 1859.
I am used to bad reviews: I was much savaged in the press when I published The Origin of Species, but Expelled holds me responsible for a particularly vile chapter of genocide which occurred in the 1930s and 40s. I do not recall advocating genocide, indeed distinctly remember writing with anguish about the massacres of the Indians in South America during my voyage on HMS Beagle. Could it be that my critics have formed opinions about my work without actually reading it? Surely not." Read on, please do.
In his second post, Charles is reading today's Sunday papers. "I had assumed that with this modern society being so dependent on the work of scientists, that the newspapers would ring with their achievements. I was delighted to see The Observer (which was in print when I was alive for the first time) and fell on it with a glad cry.......Science is mentioned....in a story about a mother and baby infected with something called a ‘superbug’, although I cannot see what is super about a bacterium that has evolved immunity to most of the treatments we have against it. Given that penicillin was not used clinically until 1942, this I think shows that evolution does not need millennia to show its effects, especially when a population is subject to selective pressures. If I may use a phrase I overheard used by a seaman on HMS Beagle, creationists, ‘may take that and shove it up, mate! Sideways.’ "
This blog is a great discovery - plenty more in the same vein may be read there. I trust that Mr Darwin will have the energy to continue writing posts. I am glad to see that he has decided to blog on Nature Network, which means that you can visit his profile, make him a friend or contact, and follow his writings with ease.
"I overheard that some American has had the nerve to make a film called Expelled traducing natural selection and championing something called ‘intelligent design’. I thought we had settled Mr Paley’s watchmaker nonsense in 1859.
I am used to bad reviews: I was much savaged in the press when I published The Origin of Species, but Expelled holds me responsible for a particularly vile chapter of genocide which occurred in the 1930s and 40s. I do not recall advocating genocide, indeed distinctly remember writing with anguish about the massacres of the Indians in South America during my voyage on HMS Beagle. Could it be that my critics have formed opinions about my work without actually reading it? Surely not." Read on, please do.
In his second post, Charles is reading today's Sunday papers. "I had assumed that with this modern society being so dependent on the work of scientists, that the newspapers would ring with their achievements. I was delighted to see The Observer (which was in print when I was alive for the first time) and fell on it with a glad cry.......Science is mentioned....in a story about a mother and baby infected with something called a ‘superbug’, although I cannot see what is super about a bacterium that has evolved immunity to most of the treatments we have against it. Given that penicillin was not used clinically until 1942, this I think shows that evolution does not need millennia to show its effects, especially when a population is subject to selective pressures. If I may use a phrase I overheard used by a seaman on HMS Beagle, creationists, ‘may take that and shove it up, mate! Sideways.’ "
This blog is a great discovery - plenty more in the same vein may be read there. I trust that Mr Darwin will have the energy to continue writing posts. I am glad to see that he has decided to blog on Nature Network, which means that you can visit his profile, make him a friend or contact, and follow his writings with ease.
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