Happy Birthday! And Thanks.

Today is Charles Darwin's 204th birthday! I haven't begun The Origin of Species yet (I've been busy reading oodles of other books), but maybe today is the day to check it out from the library and finally get started.
Darwin's discoveries have had such an enormous impact on the way I view the world, and his realization that man (and women;) is nothing more or less than every other living thing on earth has utterly changed the way I think about myself, other people and the rest of nature. And all of it is for the better. And I am forever grateful even if he'll never know it. Happy Birthday Mr. Darwin.

Evolution...what it ain't

The more I read about Darwin and his theories, the more I notice how mis-interpreted he and his ideas are by the general public. I am discovering that when people say "the theory of evolution" they don't really understand what it means. So I thought I'd take a minute to clarify a couple very important points.
1. Evolution is NOT a theory. Natural selection, are punctuated equillibrium are theories, but not evolution. So when one says "the theory of evolution" what they really mean is "the fact of evolution through the theory of natural selection". Keep that in mind when people say "Well...it is after all just a theory..." No it's not. There are hundreds of examples and proofs that evolution occurs. From the fossil record, to the history preserved in our mitochondrea, there is literally proof of evolution everywhere. It's a done deal folks. If you don't believe it, then you may as well just abandon reality all together.
2.Darwin himself never referred to his theory as "evolution". He called his theory "descent with modification". This is because evolution was already in use (see below) and because it implies progress (i.e. After years of practice the boy evolved into a fine violinist). Darwin did not believe that evolution was necessarily progressive and he did not think there was higherarchy in the natural word. He did not think sponges and ameobas were any lower than humans. He didn't think dog were higher than turtles. Many people during the time of Darwin called his theory "transmutation", because the word evolution was already in use to describe the process by which preformation (see earlier post) supposedly occured.
3. Darwin was not the first person to come up with the idea of evolution (as we know it today). There were lot's of people who thought up something simmilar before, but Darwin was the first person to come up with a solution to how it would work (i.e. natural selection). He was also one of the first to hold firmly to the idea that man was created by the same meachanism (natural selection) as every other animal, and that our consciousness and our brains are just the the by product of that process. (In contrast A.R. Wallace, who came up with the same idea as Darwin at almost the same time, thought that natural selection applied to every living thing except the human brain.)
For anyone interested in a more thorough reflection on this subject see the essay "Darwin's Delimma in Stephen Jay Gould's Ever since Darwin.