Abraham Lincoln was born on Charles Darwin\u2019s birthday; Charles Darwin was born on Abraham Lincoln\u2019s birthday: both came into the world on February 12, 1809.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Two infants destined for infamy: I picture Lincoln focused backwards in time, called to clean up the mess left by our Founding Fathers over the issue of slavery;
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 I see Darwin getting to pull together the emerging knowledge of the era and fling his fresh insights into the future.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 That some two hundred years later 40 % of Americans still don\u2019t accept evolution as anything more than \u2026\u2019just a theory, kind of like gravity\u2019\u2026 as a favorite bumper sticker puts it, never ceases to astonish, and yes, even appall, me!
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0Of course, Valentine\u2019s Day is also imminent, and I find it a delicious synchronicity that love and sexual reproduction are some of the most amazing elements of evolution!
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0In the beginning, when organisms reproduced themselves by merely dividing, their lives went on forever and ever, dividing and re-dividing for all eternity. But when evolution called for more complex creatures, sexual reproduction came into play so that two beings could co-create a third, a separate, a whole other being. And then there had to evolve a way for the parents to make space for their offspring\u2019s offspring\u2019s offspring. Thus the parent organisms had to die.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 Death entered the world the partner of sex. And those among us still harboring the old mindset, whether about exploiting humans or denying evolution, will eventually die off!
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 I suspect that this is the main impulse behind the persistent struggle to force courses on Creationism into school curricula to counteract evolution. But today\u2019s children know in their bones that there\u2019s a difference between beliefs and facts: witness any dinosaur exhibit, as Milt and I did up in Boulder one weekend. The towering creatures dwarfed the hoards of children milling about beneath their bones in rapt fascination! The footprints molded in sand and the fossil molds that became wax remnants to take home were proof positive.\u00a0And injecting Intelligent Design into science classes will not inoculate the next generation from the truth.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 But casting doubt on science itself does have its payoff. This is deliberately being done by putting verifiable scientific data into the same category as social science, which is indeed open for interpretation. For instance, the \u2018truth\u2019 of the Civil War is perceived very differently through the eyes of the abolitionist reformer, the union soldier, the confederate soldier, the slave owner, the slave, the escaped female slave running the Underground Railroad, the President attending the theatre.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 So why do this? The ultimate question to ask is, as always, \u2018what is the pay-off?\u2019 Who\u2019s making money? If you can doubt evolution and deny its evidence, you can also doubt, deny, and defy the science of climate change, and then we can all continue with \u2018business (oil, gas, coal) as usual.\u2019
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 That we are also causing mass extinctions across the planet, wiping out species that took millions of years of evolution to produce, need not be on your radar screen if you are steeped in Intelligent Design that looks backwards from now, decides how things came to be, and accepts that the designer won\u2019t destroy his handiwork (again).
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 Disciples of Darwin, on the other hand, look back on what was, is now, and is yet in the process of becoming, and weep.
\n\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 But for anyone and everyone in love with life on this planet, the stark beauty of February can break your heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Abraham Lincoln was born on Charles Darwin\u2019s birthday; Charles Darwin was born on Abraham Lincoln\u2019s birthday: both came into the world on February 12, 1809. \u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Two infants destined for infamy: I picture Lincoln focused backwards in time, called to clean up the mess left by our Founding Fathers over the issue of slavery; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-398","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-cosmology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=398"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":414,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/398\/revisions\/414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=398"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=398"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.nowforourturn.org\/CosmicReflections\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=398"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}