Charles Darwin’s Papers Published Online
April 17th, 2008The News is Buried by the Pope’s Visit to America
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| See the Complete Works of Charles Darwin |
by Glynn Wilson
Charles Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species, the controversial book that set forth the theory of evolution and changed religion and science forever, is among a large collection of private papers now published on the Web with free access by the public for the first time.
Charles Darwin’s Private Papers Published Online
It is somewhat ironic that the news was buried in the United States by the visit of Pope Benedict XVI, who is trying his best to save the Catholic church from extinction by admitting that the massive clergy sex abuse scandal was ‘badly handled’, duh.
I could not help but laugh at Wolf Blitzer and the other talking heads who, in the absence of any knowledge of what they were reporting on, talked about how the pope and the Catholic church were “for freedom and democracy.” What?
You don’t have to be a Rhodes Scholar to know enough history to realize that the Catholic Church has been as tied up in the quest for world monarchy as all the kings of Europe. The church has lost influence over the world’s masses just as the kings of old.
At least our wannabe king, George W. Bush, did not kiss the pontiff’s ring when he met him at the airport. Bush’s ignorant embrace of the pope is not about science or religion, though. It is about politics. The Republican Party would like to keep getting a share of the vote from some of the 64 million people living in the U.S. who claim to be Catholic.
But when all is said and done, the news about Darwin is far more interesting and important, since it marks the first time such a considerable collection of such important scientific papers have been made available through the Internet to the great masses of people on the Web.
According to the Cambridge University Library, the release on darwin-online.org.uk is the largest in history, comprising some 20,000 items and 90,000 images.
“This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” said John van Wyhe, director of the project. “His publications have always been available in the public sphere – but these papers have until now only been accessible to scholars.”
The collection includes thousands of notes and drafts of his scientific writings, notes from the voyage of the Beagle when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution, and his first recorded doubts about the permanence of species.
It also contains photographs of Darwin and his family, newspaper clippings, reviews of his books and more, including caricatures and notes from his boyhood musings on birds.
Publication in 1859 of Origin of Species – after years of prevarication – established Darwin as a leading scientific thinker. He was already known to the public after publication of The Voyage of the Beagle.
The book sparked a major public debate, including a bitter denunciation from the Church of England, which regarded the book as heretical, as did the Catholic Church, although in recent years, the church has tried to change its anti-science image by acknowledging the book’s contribution to human understanding of science.
“Darwin changed our understanding of nature forever,” van Wyhe said. “His papers reveal how immensely detailed his researches were. The release of his papers online marks a revolution in the public’s access to – and hopefully appreciation of – one of the most important collections of primary materials in the history of science.”
Well, not if the Pope’s attendance of a baseball game gets more attention by the corporate news media.
Tags: Evolution/Scopes Trial
April 18th, 2008 at 7:48 am
Glynn, you let the Catholic Church off a bit lightly. The list of egregious activites over the centuries also includes the Crusades, the savage represssion of the Cathars in the 13th century, the Inquisition, burning “heretics” at the stake, persecution of scientists and scholars such as Galileo and Corpernicus, the forced conversation of millions of native Americans in both hemispheres to Catholicism, etc.
Since the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and the lost Gnostic Gospels, the truth about Christianity has been available for all who wish to understand.
That truth is that, in my opinion, Yeshua (the correct Hebrew name for Jesus) taught a very mystic spiritual path, a very different faith from the one later invented more or less by Paul of Tarsus and made the established religion of the Roman Empire after the Council of Nicea in 323 CE.
The Roman Church that came into being at that time kept most of the trappings of the previous pagan religion of ancient Rome, transforming the various gods and goddesses into saints, “Christianizing” many of the old pagan festivals, such as Saturnalia, even retaining the robes and headgear of the old priesthood for the new.
The personal spirituality taught by Yeshua was replaced with an institutionalized, legalistic, authoritarian religious “empire” modeled very much on the secular Roman Empire. This model endured challenged only infrequently, and without much success, until the success of the Protestant reformation in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Unfortunately, only a few Protestant movements grasped how fundamentally distorted the original teachings of Yeshua had become, leading eventually to Protestant fundamentalist movements nearly as intolerant as medieval Catholicism.
I join you in lamenting the near-absence of coverage of the Darwin diaries. But it’s no surprise.
April 18th, 2008 at 8:14 am
I didn’t say it was a surprise, and I had no intention of giving a comprehensive history lesson. But thanks for including some of that. Perhaps the unenlightened will learn something from it, including the so-called broadcast “journalists” who, as I woke up and turned on cable news this morning, were still following the pontiff around like little puppy dogs seeking favor with their moneyed masters.
I made the Darwin story my lead story for a day on the news page for a reason – to show people why this news organization is more interesting and important to read by far than the Birmingham News and other local chain papers.
And forget local TV news, where you won’t hear word one about Darwin because you know what the uneducated Christian viewers think about him. To them, evolution and Natural Selection are “just a theory” right? In the same class of information as the creation story in Genesis.
To even mention it on the evening news in the same breath as the pope’s visit would generate angry calls from right wing Christian idiots and canceled advertising from Bush’s favorite corporate giants. It scares news directors half to death.
One of the things we try to do here is to inform a more educated audience to take back the airwaves and bring pressure to bear on news organizations to do a better job of covering these things. If liberals and libertarians were as adamant about pressuring the press as the Christian Right, we might get a more informed press – and a more enlightened populous.
April 18th, 2008 at 10:08 am
Libertarians do pressure the media, but we’re not so nearly well-organized or systematic as the neocons or religious right. We are, after all, libertarians and tend to fight when the spirit moves us, than go back, like Cincinnatus, to plowing our fields for spring planting.
We’re working on it, though.
April 18th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
Almost forgot: a great book to read regarding the history of Christianity is by a Spanish author (can’t remember his name) called “The Secret Supper.” It’s a work of fiction but it is based on historical research and revolves around Leonardo da Vinci who was, as postulated in the book, likely a pseudo-Gnostic Cathar “heretic.”
The book is better than “The Da Vinci Code” because, while the former is focused on the non-important theory that Mary Magdalene came to France and gave birth to Jesus’s child, “The Secret Supper” is focused on the discovery among Renaissance artists and intellectuals of the original spiritual path taught by Yeshua.