That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this with reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and they often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the suffering of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent First Cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.
-Charles Darwin, letter to Joseph Hooker, 1856
Tag: Charles Darwin
Academic Freedom Day and A Fair Result
Apparently the creationists at the Discovery Institute are planning an Academic Freedom Day for Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, February 12, 2009. On their website, the organizers make much use of this quote from Darwin,
A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question.
Not surprisingly, this is not quite the full quote, nor does it give the context in which Darwin wrote this. This is from the introduction to the Origin of Species where Darwin apologizes for publishing an “abstract” of his views that leaves many issues for future volumes,
This Abstract, which I now publish, must necessarily be imperfect. I cannot here give references and authorities for my several statements; and I must trust to the reader reposing some confidence in my accuracy. No doubt errors will have crept in, though I hope I have always been cautious in trusting to good authorities alone. I can here give only the general conclusions at which I have arrived, with a few facts in illustration, but which, I hope, in most cases will suffice. No one can feel more sensible than I do of the necessity of hereafter publishing in detail all the facts, with references, on which my conclusions have been grounded; and I hope in a future work to do this. For I am well aware that scarcely a single point is discussed in this volume on which facts cannot be adduced, often apparently leading to conclusions directly opposite to those at which I have arrived. A fair result can be obtained only by fully stating and balancing the facts and arguments on both sides of each question; and this cannot possibly be here done.
Of course the problem with the creationists is they constantly ask us to balance the argument of science with the arguments of pseudo-science. Ultimately, as the Discovery Institute laied it out in a 1999 memo, their agenda is the decidedly anti-scientific goal of rejecting materialism due to its “devestating” social consequences (which, of course, is precisely Philip Johnson’s entire argument).
Of course whatever else a non-materialist view of the universe may be, it ain’t science.
Charlie Brooker Reviews ‘The Genius of Darwin’
PZ Meyers linked to this review of Richard Dawkins’ new documentary ‘The Genius of Darwin’. The reviewer, Charlie Brooker, has a wit about as acerbic as Dawkins’, writing,
Darwin’s theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it’s been under attack since day one. That’s just tough luck for Darwin. If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we’d still be debating Newton with idiots too.
Since Darwin’s death, Dawkins points out, the evidence confirming his discovery has piled up and up and up, many thousand feet above the point of dispute. And yet heroically, many still dispute it. They’re like couch potatoes watching Finding Nemo on DVD who’ve suffered some kind of brain haemorrhage which has led them to believe the story they’re watching is real, that their screen is filled with water and talking fish, and that that’s all there is to reality – just them and that screen and Nemo – and when you run into the room and point out the DVD player and the cables connecting it to the screen, and you open the windows and point outside and describe how overwhelming the real world is – when you do all that, it only spooks them. So they go on believing in Nemo, with gritted teeth if necessary.
Ouch.
Happy Darwin Day!
The Origin of Species Added
Over the past couple weeks or so I’ve been spending time here and there putting Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species on this site. In many ways, the tools at my disposal to do this are as cool as all of the weblogging with automatic RSS generation.
My version of The Origin of Species started off with the Project Gutenberg text of the book. Then I added paragraph level anchors to the text. Next, I created a copy of that and added visible permalinks. The final version uses a cookie to let users toggle back and forth between hiding and showing the visible permalinks. A Javascript that Seth Dillingham wrote provides a nice highlight of a paragraph if you use an URL with a paragraph-level anchor.
The last touch was a navigation system at the top and bottom of each chapter. That’s not toggable (though it could be) but it and the visible permalinks do disappear if you choose the print-only version. Really little stuff that adds up.
Darwin’s book is probably available dozens of places, but I like having it on my server in a form that I find most useful (and that I don’t have to worry about disappearing or changing URLs on me). And it makes my evolution page all that more complete.
I hope to have all of Darwin’s major works up and in this format by the end of the summer.