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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.'"
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.
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?
Better yet, maybe somebody will actually *read* the theory before attacking it (now if we could only get some theories of theistic evolution and atheistic evolution published online for comparison, since Darwin's version wasn't partial either way).
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.
Contrariwise: Darwin's theory made no mention whatever of God, as he felt it unnecessary to postulate the involvement of such an entity. What more do you ask of atheistic evolution? 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? Why not have the magician create the universe last Thursday? It's just as scientific.
As Darwin wrote in a letter to Sir Charles Lyell,
"If I were convinced that I needed such additions to the theory of natural selection, I would reject it as rubbish ... I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection, if it requires miraculous additions at any one stage of descent."
(see Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker, p.249)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.