Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
The little-known fact that he signed his name as "Chuck D."
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
Oooh, good, I've been looking for some new fiction to read.
(Let the flamewar commence.)
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
I can't seem to access the site, and I live in Kansas. Maybe it's just a technical problem. Please, could somebody pray to Our Lord and have Him fix my innerweb, in His mercy?
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.
The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (ISBN 0393059812) is a great recent (and concise) biography that picks up on his return from the Beagle adventure and takes the reader on an interesting journey past dangling duck's feet, barnacle gonads, and earthworm poop. And the publications, of course.
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Sadly, since estimates of the opinions/beliefs of the US population usually hit around 40% "young earthers" and 45% "guided by the great spirit in the sky," this may be of interest to only a relatively small segment of the population
Trusted by cats.
Behold!
Proof of the existence of God by the Banana Argument.
(and here's the entire episode if this sort of TV evangelism tickles your fancy)
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
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.
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
It is the worst kind of sophistry to argue that Darwinism can't be true because it makes you feel bad. Boo hoo! I was pretty upset when I found out that earth was not the center of the universe. But then I got over it-- in grade school.
Darwin did not "degrade life to an accidental tissue mass." He only made some observations about nature, and formed some theories based on those. As it turns out, these theories do a pretty good job of explaining how species change over time, and how new species are formed-- in fact, they've pretty much become the backbone of evolutionary biology.
Darwin himself was not a fascist or a rightist as you allege. In fact, he was a Christian, and he was as much troubled by questions of how to reconcile faith and reason as others. Hitler came to power almost a century later, and was influenced as much by nationalism and mysticism as by science. Stalin never accepted Darwinism-- in fact, he strictly prohibited it from being taught in Russia while he was in power. Instead, he favored the pseudo-scientist Lysenko. Try reading something about history before you spout this kind of nonsense. Assuming that history doesn't hurt your feelings too much!
Finally-- there is a lot of good evidence that man has transcended biological evolution. The whole point of having a big brain and a complex social structure is so that you don't have to make up a new gene each time you learn a new trick. And of course, in the future, genetic engineering will allow us to have whatever genes we desire.
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
"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)
Interactive Visual Medical Dictionary
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.