Happy Darwin Day

Today is the 201st anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and now considered an unofficial holiday. It is intended to recognize the contributions Darwin made to science, most especially the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. Most people simply refer to this as “evolution,” but that technically falls a little short of the mark – evolution can refer to anything that changes. It’s the “natural selection” part that defines what Darwin kick-started.

It’s kind of a funny thing to celebrate, really. Most of the scientists that have contributed remarkable amounts to our base of knowledge have no such day. James Clerk Maxwell, who demonstrated the properties of electromagnetism, has no such day. He was the first to show that electricity, radio waves, and light are all part of the same spectrum of energy and properties, which impacts everything from the computer you’re reading this on, to the microwave oven you heated the Hot Pockets you’re snacking on, to the GPS network that feeds the little voice in the car that you’re not driving right now. Einstein? Absolutely amazing body of work, most of it theoretical until science caught up with ways to test it, and incidentally has a hand in that GPS you’re not using. Pasteur? Galileo, Archimedes, Aristotle, Hubble, Hawking, Nye? Nope, no days for them.

So why Darwin? Was it that he made this tremendous intuitive or intellectual leap? Not really – he was more the meticulous type, and built a body of evidence for his theory over quite a period of time. Was he particularly far ahead of his time? Nope – he actually rushed to press with “On the Origin of Species” to beat out Sir Alfred Russell Wallace, who was working on exactly the same thing (later, they lectured together.) “Rushed to press” is kind of a relative thing, since he’d been working on the concept for 17 years – I said he was meticulous. Was it because it had such a huge impact on the various fields of study that it pertained to? Partially, perhaps, though Einstein and Maxwell have him well beat, and I’d even argue that Hubble changed his field more that Darwin.

In fact, what Darwin produced was, in some ways, inevitable. He was simply an investigator, and followed where the evidence led. Natural Selection was already waiting to be discovered. Worldwide travel, worldwide communications (albeit much slower then,) universities and the scientific method, and even the printing press all collaborated on his work, and gave him the opportunity to see how universal his concept was by comparing the findings of countless others who hadn’t quite made the intuitive leap. I don’t want to denigrate him, because I’m fascinated and humbled by what he accomplished, but I feel much more so by the others that I’ve mentioned above.

Darwin is noticeably controversial, though. More religious nutbags attack him than any other scientist, by a huge margin. Why? Apparently, because he claims the scriptures wrong, if you were to ask most of the rabid nitwits. But he made no such claim, he merely demonstrated how much of nature does that on its own. Facts are the culprit, and they don’t claim, they prove it pretty impressively. In fact, most fields of science all contribute to that – geology, biology, physics, astrophysics – you can keep the list going for quite a while, methinks. Geology, by the way, established that the earth was much older than any scripture claimed long before Darwin published anything.

Is it because he’s worshiped as a demigod by science, even though he was wrong? Um, it’s safe to say, “no,” to that one, since most scientific fields have the most rigorous systems in place to establish how accurate anything is, and Natural Selection has stood the test of time and abuse quite well. Bear in mind, Darwin speculated on a method of living beings automatically passing on information to their progeny decades before we had even an inkling of what DNA was. Darwin isn’t worshiped any more than Pasteur is, and doesn’t even have a process named after himself.

Maybe it’s because he says we came from monkeys? But he didn’t, and that’s actually a dishonest twisting of the theory that’s propagated by all those religious folk who claim to be ethical and moral. We have a common ancestor with the great apes, which isn’t saying that we came from monkeys any more than it says monkeys came from us. This has been corrected literally thousands of times in the past, which certainly isn’t enough to cause any religious retard to stop using it. Why let simple facts get in the way? We also share a common ancestor with every living thing on the planet, by the way – monkeys aren’t special, or singled out by any branch of biology.

However, that is the real sticking point: if we were made in god’s image, god at some point in the past looked like a single-celled organism swimming in a sea of muck. That’s what the hullabaloo is all about, when it comes right down to it: we have no link to the divine, and we were not created for a grand plan, and we are not living on a planet created especially for us, and we are not lined up to receive a grand reward once we expire. That’s all. Simple human vanity causes all sorts of indignant responses. And that’s why we recognize Darwin – because so much of our “culture” gets into a hissy fit when they’re told they’re not special, and spends inordinate amounts of time trying to spread abject denial. Darwin Day is, unfortunately, a rather pathetic commentary on our species. Imagine having “Gravity Day” or “Thermodynamics Day” because insecure little folk with big mouths can’t accept that the world isn’t stroking their ego the way they want.

I, for one, find the concept of Natural Selection absolutely fascinating, and thinking that the abilities I have now all built up over a very significant length of time is pretty damn cool. I’m not bothered by mortality at all (I think immortality would be incredibly boring,) and I’m not concerned with playing a part in any plan favored by the petty and emotional gods in the scriptures. Investigating the world leads to so much knowledge and fascination, and I almost feel sorry for the people that don’t want it to exist.

Almost. Mostly, I think they’re pathetic.

Happy Darwin Day, everyone! Happy Everyone in Science Day, too! Go out and experience something real.