Revolution #154, February 1, 2009
Get Ready For Darwin Day 2009
February 12 is Darwin Day, an annual international celebration of the birthday of Charles Darwin, who first developed the scientific theory of evolution of life on earth. This year’s Darwin Day is special—marking 200 years since Darwin’s birth. And November 24, 2009 will be the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s groundbreaking work The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, which first put forward his theory.
It is no exaggeration to say that Charles Darwin opened the door to a revolution in human thought—in how we approach and understand the world we live in, and how we look at ourselves. For most of human history, people did not even know that life had evolved. They had no way of knowing that salamanders, oak trees, humming birds, gazelles, moss, sharks, and all the vast and wonderful diversity of living things—including human beings—share a series of common ancestors, going back ultimately to the original one-celled bacteria-like creatures that appeared on earth 3.5 billion years ago through entirely natural processes.
The science of evolution has enabled people to understand, and to further investigate, what is real—as opposed to the religious belief that life was created by some god and has remained unchanged since then.
Society would be far different—for the worse—without the knowledge of evolution. Take, for example, serious public health problems that humanity faces today, such as the AIDS virus, the brain-wasting “mad cow disease,” bacteria resistant to antibiotics, to name just a few. None of these problems can be tackled in the right way unless you understand and take into account the past and present evolution of the disease-causing agents. Evolution is such a crucial and central concept for the understanding of all living things that a famous geneticist once said that “nothing in biology makes sense, except in light of evolution.” Darwin’s work greatly strengthened the scientific method and its role in society—and in today’s world, science would be unimaginable without the theory of evolution.
Far from depriving people of a sense of wonderment, the truth of Darwin’s discovery allows us to appreciate life in all its amazing complexity and beauty. As Darwin himself put it so poetically in The Origin of Species,“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. There is grandeur in this view of life....”
Evidence that evolution is true is all around us: the fossils of animals and plants from millions and billions of years ago; the genes in living cells that reveal, for example, when the evolutionary lines that led to chimpanzees and human beings diverged from a common ancestor; features of developing embryos that reveal the inter-relatedness of animals that look quite different when fully formed; evolutionary transformations we can see today, like the rapid changes in flu viruses that necessitate the development of a new vaccine each year. In the century and a half since the publication of The Origin of Species, nobody has found scientific evidence—not even a single one—to disprove the basic facts of evolution.
Yet today, there is a powerful anti-rational movement in the U.S. that is trying to suppress evolutionary theory and the scientific method overall. George W. Bush, who infamously claimed that “the jury is still out on evolution,” may no longer be president. But Rick Warren, the head of Saddleback mega-church who promotes the biblical story of creation as literal truth, was given a major spotlight when he delivered the invocation at Obama’s inauguration. And in Texas, the head of the State Education Board and other right-wingers are trying to insert anti-scientific falsehoods against evolution into school curricula.
All this brings urgency to celebrating this year’s Darwin Day and reaching out broadly with the truth of evolution. A battle is raging in society over epistemology—that is, over the nature of truth and how people come to know the truth. Do people go after the truth by applying the scientific method and seeking the actual material causes of things in the real world? Or will people be shackled by belief in supernatural things that don’t even exist?
“Everyone needs to understand the basic facts of evolution as well as the essentials of the scientific method…. When people are deprived of a scientific approach to reality as a whole, they are robbed of both a full appreciation of the beauty and richness of the natural world and the means to understand the dynamics of change not only in nature but in human society as well.” Ardea Skybreak, from her book The Science of Evolution: Knowing What’s Real and Why It Matters |
How these questions are answered has everything to do with whether a real revolutionary movement can be brought forward. Making revolution will take millions of people—not only intellectuals, but especially among the most brutally exploited and oppressed—struggling to figure out and act on the real world, in order to change it in the interests of all humanity.
It is in this light that we encourage all our readers to join in the international celebration of Darwin’s breakthrough in human thought, and to work with others so that this year’s Darwin Day has a society-wide impact.
Some websites to check out:
The Defend Science Initiative at www.defendscience.org
A list of Darwin Day events around the country:
www.darwinday.org
Information about Evolution Weekend, Feb 14-15:
www.butler.edu/clergyproject/rel_evolution_weekend_2009.htm
To learn more about Darwin Day and Darwin Year, check out the Coalition on the Public Understanding of Science at www.copusproject.org/yearofscience2009.
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
