How important is Darwin?

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It is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. How do Darwin's ideas rank in the history of science?

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[bellyscratch]

This seems like a good blog post about Darwin

link (http://bermudaradical.wordpress.com/2009/02/12/charles-darwin-and-materialist-science-darwin-the-reluctant-revolutionary/)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Check this out:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1357259&postcount=4

[Raúl Duke]

I remember reading a link that claims that 50% of the UK believes in evolution...today I was watching the news and they mention that 14% of Americans believe in evolution...
:blink::(:blink:

[Killfacer]

I remember reading a link that claims that 50% of the UK believes in evolution...today I was watching the news and they mention that 14% of Americans believe in evolution...
:blink::(:blink:

Weird, i thought more people beleived in evolution in England than that. The only people who didn't at my school were bullied by me and others constantly, thinking about it it was probably a bit harsh.

[Yazman]

There's actually people who don't acknowledge evolution as fact? I've never met anybody like that before.. although I'm not british or american.

[Ismail]

There's actually people who don't acknowledge evolution as fact? I've never met anybody like that before.. although I'm not british or american.Most Congressmen and Senators in the U.S. either flat out deny evolution or hold that God guides evolution.

[Tzonteyotl]

Most Congressmen and Senators in the U.S. either flat out deny evolution or hold that God guides evolution.

"You don't have to take an IQ test to be a senator."

I forget which senator it was who said that (in the documentary Religulous), but yeah, speaks volumes about the "representatives" of the people. Though, if the statistic on acceptance/belief in evolution for the US is correct, I guess the senators really are representative of the people in that specific regard. Quite unfortunate.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Shouldn't this thread be in Science?

[Niccolò Rossi]

Thought I might post this here: Darwin and the Workers Movement, ICC.


This year sees the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth (and the passing of 150 years since the publication of Origin of Species). The marxist wing of the workers' movement has always saluted Darwin's outstanding contributions to humanity's understanding of itself and nature.
In many ways Darwin was typical of his time, interested in observing nature and happy to conduct experiments on animal and plant life. His empirical work with, among other things, bees, beetles, worms, pigeons and barnacles, was scrupulous and detailed. Darwin's dogged attention to the latter was such that his younger children "began to think that all adults must be similarly employed, leading one to ask of a neighbour ‘Where does he do his barnacles?'" (Darwin, Desmond & Moore).
What distinguished Darwin was his ability to go beyond details, to theorise and look for historical processes when others were content just to categorise phenomena or accept existing explanations. A typical example of this was his response to discovering marine fossils thousands of feet up in the Andes. Armed with the experience of an earthquake and Lyell's Principles of Geology he was able to speculate on the scale of earth movements that had caused the contents of the sea bed to end up in the mountains, without having to resort to Biblical accounts of a Great Flood. "I am a firm believer, that without speculation there is no good & original observations" (as he wrote in a letter to AR Wallace, 22/12/1857)
He was also not afraid to take observations from one field and use them in other areas. Although Marx held most of the writings of Thomas Malthus in contempt, Darwin was able to use his ideas on human population growth in developing his theory of evolution. "In October 1838 I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstance favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation on new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work" (Darwin's ‘Recollections of the Development of my mind and character').
It was 20 years before this theory made its public appearance in Origin of Species, but the essentials are already there. In Origin Darwin explains that he uses "the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense" and "for convenience sake" and that by Natural Selection he means the "preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations." The idea of evolution was not new, but, already, in 1838, Darwin was already developing an explanation of how species evolved. He compared the techniques of greyhound breeders and pigeon fanciers (artificial selection) with natural selection and thought it the most "beautiful part of my theory" (Darwin quoted in Desmond & Moore).


Continued here (http://en.internationalism.org/icconline/2009/02/darwin-workers)

[INDK]

Well, evolution is a pretty damn important idea in the history of science, so yeah, I think he's one of the more prominent figures in scientific history.

[mikelepore]

The idea of evolution is a victory of reason over mythology. For example, we can see that the mammal fossils are found in the top layers of sedimentary rock, and we can see that the ancient trilobites and ammonites are found in deeper layers. There is reasonableness in saying that the many forms of life went through this gradual sequence. To say that God in six days just made the rocks to look that way is to throw away the power of reason and to allow fairy tales to rule the mind. Whatever human emancipation may consist of, we can be sure that it will be found in reason and not in stupidity.

[Coggeh]

I remember reading a link that claims that 50% of the UK believes in evolution...today I was watching the news and they mention that 14% of Americans believe in evolution...
:blink::(:blink:
The fact that its not 90+ in both places kind of makes me a little sick ... 14% ?.. seriously ? ... I really do feel sick :(

[RebelDog]

Most Congressmen and Senators in the U.S. either flat out deny evolution or hold that God guides evolution. But they only care about what can get them elected/re-elected. If 86% of Americans, suddenly, for no known reason believed in Odin, then there would be a corresponding effect on the paganism of US Senators.


I forget which senator it was who said that (in the documentary Religulous), but yeah, speaks volumes about the "representatives" of the people. Though, if the statistic on acceptance/belief in evolution for the US is correct, I guess the senators really are representative of the people in that specific regard. Quite unfortunate.They are representative of what the narrow US electoral system and powerful US economic interests allow. If they were representative of what the majority of what US citizens desire then there already would be socialised health care in the US. For obvious reasons it is OK to claim to represent their voters by claiming to hold christian beliefs. Such a stance does not run against the powerful economic interests which are the only ones that really count in capitalist society, in fact they help perpetuate such interests and their ideology. Where Senators or any other elected officials know they are spouting a populist sentiment that does not rock the boat of the establishment and helps hide real issues like socialised health care, government subsidy to private comapanies, US imperialism, workers rights etc, they and the media gleefully collude to promote things like religious belief as paramount in elections.

[Blackscare]

I live in the US, and while I'm prepared to believe the rate is quite embarrasing on it's own, I cannot believe it's 14%. I've met one person in my life so far that has actually flat out denied evolution, and that's with my time split between New York and Florida, so I've seen a good sampling of the population.

Are you sure the figure didn't relate to a specific state or region? I'm willing to bet in say, Alabama or something, it's around 14%. Where I live I'd put it up around 90% at least are firm believers in evolution.

[Killfacer]

I live in the US, and while I'm prepared to believe the rate is quite embarrasing on it's own, I cannot believe it's 14%. I've met one person in my life so far that has actually flat out denied evolution, and that's with my time split between New York and Florida, so I've seen a good sampling of the population.

Are you sure the figure didn't relate to a specific state or region? I'm willing to bet in say, Alabama or something, it's around 14%. Where I live I'd put it up around 90% at least are firm believers in evolution.

As if it's 90%.

[Nils T.]

I just seen a poll in an article about darwin.
The UK is the fifth of the countries listed, in a decreasing order of the percentage of positive answers to the question "did today's men develop from animal species that existed before ?".
Iceland is first with almost 85% yes and 7% no, danemark follows with about 83% and 14% (I read the graph and can't be really accurate), then france with 80% and 12%, then japan with 78% and 9%, then the uk with 74% and 18%.
The US are 19th with 40% yes and 40% no, and turkey is 20th and the last of the graph with 27% yes and 50% no.
The article precise that the arguments of the creationnists from the united states are appropriated by the turkish creationnists, though the latter are comfortable with the idea of an earth older than a few thousands years that the first ones won't accept. I would be interested by the results in china and india, but they are not listed.

This study is interesting too, about the influence of creationnism in different religious communities.
The responses were analyzed according to religious affiliation. When asked whether they agree more with intelligent design or evolution, 88 percent of Jewish doctors and 60 percent of Roman Catholic physicians said they agree more with evolution, while 54 percent of Protestant doctors agreed more with intelligent design.
When asked whether intelligent design has legitimacy as science, 83 percent of Jewish doctors and 51 percent of Catholic doctors said they believe intelligent design is simply "a religiously inspired pseudo-science rather than a legitimate scientific speculation." But 63 percent of Protestant doctors said intelligent design is a "legitimate scientific speculation."
The study was conducted by the Louis Finkelstein Institute for Social and Religious Research at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City and HCD Research in Flemington, N.J.