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Charles Darwin Online
eldavojohn writes "The entire works of Charles Darwin have been made available online. It includes scanned works that were owned by his family — many of which were signed by the author. The University of Cambridge hopes to have this completed by 2009 and is only estimated to be about half way done. If you have any love for books whatsoever, I suggest you take a look at how they present the user with each book. Take the very first edition of On the Origin of Species, for example, where they use frames to display the text on the left with the original image on the right. From the Reuters article: 'Other items in the free collection of 50,000 pages and 40,000 images are the first editions of the Journal of Researchers, written in 1839, The Descent of Man, The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle, which includes his observations during his five-year trip to the Amazon, Patagonia and the Pacific, and the first five editions of the Origin of Species.'"
vs.
English has a future tense for a reason. Please learn to use it.
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Charles Darwin, should, regardless of your personal belief of the veracity of evolutionary theory, be regarded as on of the greatest men to have ever lived. He, in the face of tremendous religious and scientific adversity, put forth an astounding scientific theory worked out through great diligence.
In the Origin of Species, with relentless precision he works his way through the variation of domesticated and wild animals and plants, and eventually culminates in a very strongly supported theory which is almost elegant in its simplicity. He even anticipates many challenges to his theory, in the aptly named chapter, Difficulties on theory. Darwin's accomplishment is perhaps even more impressive when you take into account that he had no knowledge of genetics or the mechanism of inheritance, and was most certainly not aware of anything such as DNA. His writing is precise and lively; even today, 150 years later, the Origin of Species is easily followed by a layman.
This site is an honour to Darwin's efforts and I hope it will inspire some people to read his works.
Absolute proof that the base laws of the universe are random rather than intelligently ordered, of course.
But that would be atheistic cosmology. Evolution says nothing about the laws of the universe; that's physics, not biology, and Darwin wasn't involved in that end of things at all.
It's evolution happening without the involvement of a god. That's the whole point. If you're going to allow for evolution 'helped over the jumps', in Dawkins' phrase, by some magician, then why bother at all?
Because it's a damned interesting engineering method; one that could prove highly useful in the sciences of Artificial Intelligence, biology, robotics, and maybe best of all, environmental cleanups.
An intellgently guided environment for mutations to live or die in is a highly powerful idea.
True, we could learn to apply the theory. Let us say, we create by genetic engineering some species or strain and set it to work, and use our understanding of evolution to predict its effect on the ecology. But that doesn't make much difference to evolution as an explanation of our origins. If we're reduced to postulating miraculous interventions, we're not doing science.
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The descent for a theistic evolutionist comes *after* the miraculous additions. Without the miraculous addition, there'd be no life because the Big Bang itself would have collapsed back in under it's own gravity and chaos. The descent Darwin wrote about happened at least 15 billion years later by what we now know- the physical laws that govern it were already in place by then, having been decided during that strange injection of information and energy during the Big Bang. When we figure that out (if we ever can) we will know the face of God that was the original reason for scientific research to begin with.
Ah, we've been at cross-purposes. What I understand by 'theistic evolution' is that evolution proceeds naturally, but that God intervenes from time to time to adjust its direction, like an alien with a Monolith, with some ultimate aim in mind. What you have there is something different, which I'd call 'deism': God rigs the universe at the outset, presses the detonator switch for the Big Bang, and then walks away. That's another issue entirely, all about the fine-tuning of universal constants and so forth, and I'd class it as part of cosmology, not evolution. It's something to take up with Einstein, not Darwin.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Also, I mentioned Catholics and you call them a small percentage of Christians, but I'd just like to point out to people not aware of this that here in America, Catholics are not considered Christians because they worship statues and believe that good works will get you into heaven. Don't argue with me about the worshipping statues bit either; argue with all the fundamentalists, since that's their position.
I avoid using the word Christian to describe my beliefs for exactly that reason. I've always wondered why the Fundamentalists avoid the Epistle of James and a traditional reading of the Epistles of Peter.....where both good works getting you into heaven (James) and the "cloud of witnesses" those statues represent (Peter) are literally mentioned.
Still, there's a billion Roman Catholics out there, 400 million lesser Catholics, 500 million liturgical Protestants, and only about a hundred million Evangelical Fundamentalists in comparison- and thanks to their reading of Sola Scriptura, they don't hold to a single interpretation of scripture anyway. Very few of them know more than about 30 verses from the Bible, I've found. All the rest of us have no problem with evolution. What we have a slight problem with is Quantum Mechanics- very slight, but it's enough to make atheistic evolution stick in our craw sometimes.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Yes, there is dogmatism on both sides. However, there is only any actual science on one. The mere fact that a point of view has dogmatic supporters does not make it incorrect.
You seem to be missing the point that:
In-order to invalidate the "theory of evolution", the burden is on YOU to come up with a better theory.
Your new theory must also have falsifiable or testable predictions about things not yet observed.
I look forward to reading your paper.
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While you're at it, make sure to blame Newton for the improvements in artillery that ensued due to a better understanding of kinetics. Or blame Mendeleev for devising the periodic table, since improvements in chemistry led to mustard gas.
"Social Darwinism" was never part of Darwin's work. It's a fraudulent extension of it, and to blame Darwin for that is ludicrous.
And Darwin never said that any species, race, or specimen "deserved to die". He only described why some did and why some didn't. Almost every trained biologist buys into Darwin's theory of natural selection, and they all abhor the destruction of the environment.
I blame Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and the destruction of the environment on ignorance, the kind that Darwin fought so effectively against, the kind you are propogating right now.
What I understand by 'theistic evolution' is that evolution proceeds naturally, but that God intervenes from time to time to adjust its direction, like an alien with a Monolith, with some ultimate aim in mind. What you have there is something different, which I'd call 'deism': God rigs the universe at the outset, presses the detonator switch for the Big Bang, and then walks away.
"Theistic evolutionist" means a theist who believes in common descent through evolution. It includes ID types who believe in common descent with God miraculously tweaking the process, but it also refers to people who believe God created life entirely through the secondary cause of natural laws. Yes, the latter sounds sort of like deism. But there's a major difference. IIRC, deists believe that God set up the universe and walked away, and does not interact with humanity in any kind of personal way--the deist God is entirely impersonal. (There may be exceptions to that. At the least, deists don't believe in miracles.) Theistic evolution only refers to the development of life. Christian theistic evolutionists still believe that God really did pick out Abraham and the Jews to bless all humanity (ultimately through Jesus), and some will believe that most of the Bible after Genesis 11 is true history.
Even young-earth creationists believe that God can (and does) act in that so-called "deistic" fashion. For instance, they believe that God knits us together in our mothers' wombs, makes the grass grow, and clothes the daisies in splendor. But that doesn't mean he interrupts natural law--he made and sustains the universe, including natural law. (The biggest problem creationists have with evolution is that it doesn't fit with a straight-forward reading of Genesis as a historical account.)
"Well, if you think about it, there are only two choices: Creation or Evolution. There is no third possibility. "
"Creation" is not even a "theory", as it makes no falsifiable or testable predictions about things not yet observed.
If you have a reproducable test where you get "God" to create new life forms I think you should publish a paper.
As it stands, in the context of science, you have failed to provide a new "theory" of our origins.
(please try to avoid logical fallacies)
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You mean God, who made a created perfect people but didn't foresee they were prone to temptation, and was surprised (according to Genesis) when they sinned against him, then banished them, then decided to wipe out all of them and their descendants, except for one family which was righteous, but the father of that family later turned out to be a drunkard and not so righteous after all?
The God who laid down the law for the Hebrews, telling them the wages of sin were death, then later coming to earth as a man and saying the old law doesn't apply anymore, that there's a new covenant where you don't have to die, but instead can have eternal life?
The God who smote Sodom and Gomorrah, but allowed Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Saddam, et al to do their nasty deeds until some HUMANS decided to put a stop to it?
Is that the unchanging God you're talking about?
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"This calls for a very special blend of psychology and extreme violence" - Vyvyan "The Young Ones"
Are you sure it was in a newspaper and not a creationist rumor mill site? The "X recanted his belief in evolution, so evolution isn't true!" is not only logically uninteresting, but I've found that it almost always turns out to be a fabrication for any significant value of X.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
It's a good thing you didn't, because you make reference to intellectual honesty later in your post. Can you point us to some evidence that Darwin's goal was to escape responsibility to a God? I've never seen any such statements in his work. I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that you heard this from an unreliable source rather than just making it up. Of course, I could be totally wrong, but I definitely won't believe it without a solid reference.
An interesting anagram of "BANACH TARSKI" is "BANACH TARSKI BANACH TARSKI"
Don't act like the title is a hush-hush secret, because that title is printed in the Penguin edition I bought from Amazon a month ago. And by "races," he meant what we call species. This is obvious to anyone who reads the first few pages of the book, which tells me you didn't read the book. Let me be more clear by quoting from the book you denigrate, but never read:
Oh my, Darwin was a cabbage racist! Stop the presses! Oh wait, that's stupid. You saw the word "races," thought "aha, ammunition" and went running. Here's a hint--don't trust creationist web-pages, because they'll give you a misleading, caricatured idea of what Darwinism means. They'll make you look like an idiot because you'll run around calling him a racist, when anyone who even reads chapter 1 of the book knows he was talking about varieties, or species, not races like the KKK gets hung up on.
I'm not clear why I would credit Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot et al to Darwin since all of these dictators were motivated by a lust for power, not because they were convinced of common descent. Are you calling everyone who believes in common descent a Nazi? "Those murderous dictators" weren't perfect Darwinists, because nothing they did was "Darwinian." Darwinism is based on variation in the gene pool, acted upon by a selective force, leading to diversity. Oppose that to Hitler, whose philosophy was based on the idea of a "pure race." It's obvious that Hitler's views were not based on Darwin's ideas. In fact, both Stalin and Hitler actually banned Darwin's works. Stalin banned the teaching of Darwinian evolution. So by what stretch of the imagination were they "perfect Darwinists"? If a political leader banned the bible, would you infer from that that he was a perfect Christian?
Since Darwin died long before Hitler or Stalin came to power, how could he keep their company? Even if they based their policies on his ideas, which they clearly didn't since they banned his works, what control does a naturalist have over a wacko who kills people 70 years later?I don't ask that you suddenly change your mind. I do ask, however, that you stop being an idiot, and make an effort to think your arguments through. It takes one Google search and 30 seconds of reading to refute every single point you made. It's not that I think I'm smart, only that your arguments are so embarrassingly bad that people will inevitably conclude that you're stupid. If you aren't stupid, then stop being intellectually lazy.
Why do people still argue that a bombadier beetle can't evolve without flaming up and dying when multiple potential paths to allow such evolution have been described?
Why do people still argue that a bumblebee can't fly when the physics of the process have long since been explained?
Why do people still insist that planetary evolution has any significant relationship to biological evolution?
Why do people still argue that macro-evolution can't happen, but they accept micro-evolution, when there's no actual difference between the two, save what part of the organism was altered?
Why do people argue that Charles Darwin invented the idea of evolution when the concept of evolution was actually devised decades, if not centuries, earlier by theolgians looking to explain how life on Earth had changed from the time God originally created it?
Why do people argue that a theory is an immutable statement of fact, when it's not?
Why do people never loudly declare that light bulbs, internal combustion engines, speakers, electronics, and telephones are a scientific scam or not to be "believed in" when the entire basis for their functionality is rooted firmly in theories?
Because some people aren't rational beings, that's why. Because some people were taught to believe certain things, and they have no interest in educating themselves on the subject they fear before they argue about it. Because some people just don't know or care what they're talking about.