Missing Shades of Grue

"For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs - as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practises infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

"Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system - with all these exalted powers - Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."

From Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (New York: Appleton and Co., 1883)

Will Wright explains the new video game Spore, which should be released in the fall. I think it will be useful in my Darwin and Philosophy class, so I'm looking forward to its release.

Flick Filosopher offers one of my favorite reviews of Expelled, the recent anti-evolution movie from the ridiculously boring Ben Stein and his inane friends.

Nazis! It's all about Nazis. In a parallel universe even crazier than our own, Ben Stein is making a documentary about how the Nazis utilized the controversial theory of gravity to make bombs that fall from the sky to the earth, and so the theory of gravity must be wrong. But we are here, and here, Ben Stein is telling us with a straight face that because the Nazis thought it would be a good idea to breed people like people breed animals, the theory of evolution must be wrong.

Since the Genocide Awareness Project just visited our campus last week, graphically equating abortion with the horrors of genocide, I should no longer be surprised by such impoverished reasoning. But I am! When I think about it, however, these outrageous propaganda campaigns seem to rise to the level of the famous Nazi propaganda machine. Oops, now there I go....

FlickFilosopher.com: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed (review)

This birthday tribute to Darwin must have him rolling in his grave, or it would if he could watch YouTube.



YouTube - Evolution Explainer

It's Darwin Day but unfortunately my Darwin and Philosophy class was canceled due to snow and freezing rain. So, I'm home, with a cup of coffee, listening to Herbie Hancock, and thinking about this:

If under changing conditions of life organic beings present individual differences in almost every part of their structure, and this cannot be disputed; if there be, owing to their geometrical rate of increase, a severe struggle for life at some age, season or year, and this certainly cannot be disputed; then, considering the infinite complexity of the relations of all organic beings to each other and to their conditions of life, causing an infinite diversity in structure, constitution, and habits, to be advantageous to them, it would be a most extraordinary fact if no variations had ever occurred useful to each being's own welfare, in the same manner as so many variations have occurred useful to man. But if variations useful to any organic being ever do occur, assuredly individuals thus characterised will have the best chance of being preserved in the struggle for life; and from the strong principle of inheritance, these will tend to produce offspring similarly characterised. This principle of preservation, or the survival of the fittest, I have called natural selection.

I'm having my class read John Dewey's essay The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy, which was written in 1909, the 50th anniversary of Origin. We're going talk about what's changed in the last 99 years. Here's a rather insightful passage that I just love.

Religious considerations lent fervor to the controversy, but they did not provoke it. Intellectually, religious emotions are not creative but conservative. They attach themselves readily to the current view of the world and consecrate it. They steep and dye intellectual fabrics in the seething vat of emotions; they do not form their warp and woof. There is not, I think, an instance of any large idea about the world being independently generated by religion. Although the ideas that rose up like armed men against Darwinism owed their intensity to religious associations, their origin and meaning are to be sought in science and philosophy, not in religion.

Where have you gone, John Dewey?