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Darwin's Voyage Done Over, Live
thrill12 writes "Almost 178 years ago, Charles Darwin set sail in the HMS Beagle, to do the now famous explorations that formed the basis for Darwin's On The Origin Of Species. Now, a group of British and Dutch scientists, journalists and artists set sail again to redo the voyage of the Beagle. This time, they are taking modern equipment with them and they have live connections through Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Flickr. As they re-explore, and (re)discover, we can join that 8-month-long trip, live over the internet."
This does sound like a cool project and I'll keep an eye on it, but I worry about the consequences of lauding Darwin and his work too much. Creationists, IDers and other crackpots often attack evolution by attacking errors or omissions that Darwin made, ignoring almost two centuries of refinements and advancements since his work. They also love to strawman scientists and other people who accept the evidence for evolution by referring to them as "Darwinists", implying that it's a simple case of "faith in God" vs. "faith in Darwin", rather than a matter of evidence.
Considering this trip is a dutch/english project and the creationist/id crackpots are mainly located in the US of A, I fail to see the problem. I can't speak for the folks across the channel, but over here in the netherlands the kind of people that believe in creationism are generally speaking quietly ignored, right along with the alien abductees, the moon landing hoax proponent and other similar characters ;-)
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
It's not a strawman to refer to people who accept evolution as Darwinists. Besides, many staunch evolutionists (like Richard Dawkins) do profess their belief in "Darwinian evolution" and "Darwinian life" and so forth (see this article by Dawkins {scroll down to his portion of it}: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203440104574405030643556324.html).
Dawkins is one of the main faces of anti-Creationism / pro-evolution and he does exhibit Darwin worship. Sure, he's only one person but I've met many like him in their beliefs of evolution.
Further, many people in our world may not worship Darwin but they worship science and have science as their object of faith. Science is great but it is not perfect (I mean both that science is not perfect and the scientific method is not perfect). A study of the philosophy of science and epistemology should help people understand that. We can't get too hung up on evolution because like you said, we've had "almost two centuries of refinements and advancements since [Darwin's] work" and will have many more in the future; we might have discoveries or advancements or refinements that will completely revolutionize and change what we know about evolution!
I'm not anti-evolution; I'm a scientist working in the fields of neuropsychology, neuroscience, and neurobiology but I think it's important to not put too much faith in the scientific method either.