The News is Buried by the Pope’s Visit to America

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.

Now don’t get us wrong. We have a modicum of respect for Albert Brewer, especially since that dirty, racist 1970 George Wallace campaign against his run for governor was recently named Number One on the Most Negative Campaigns of All Time.

But Mr. Brewer’s recent decision to recruit and hire Andrew Westmoreland away from Ouachita Baptist University in Little Rock, Arkansas - even after he admitted lying about praying about taking the job - raises all kinds of questions about religion, ethics, politics and education.

Baptist Samford U. Hires President Who Admits Lying About Praying

Photo by Glynn Wilson

Speaking of connecting with nature, after a couple of springs of trying we now have blue birds breeding in the backyard. I managed to get a decent shot of one a couple of days ago after returning from the trek to New Orleans.

Meanwhile, the breaking news this morning that the wife of a charismatic Church of Christ minister slain in Tennessee was arrested and charged with the murder when she turned up in Orange Beach, Alabama, raises even more questions about what’s going on in the so-called “faith-based community.”

Slain Tennessee Minister’s Wife to Be Charged with Murder

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Can we please stop the religious crusades and jihads and get on with the business of saving the world and savoring life?

If you find yourself saying, “The world has gone crazy,” then think about this. You don’t hear a lot these days about pot smoking, beer drinking, nature loving hippies causing the world a lot of trouble.

What the world needs more of are canoes on top of vans and a reconnection with nature. Alabama native and Harvard scholar E.O. Wilson called it biophilia, and it may be more important to our mental health than any words that could ever be uttered from a pulpit.

So forget the preachers and the religious educators who lie about prayer. It’s beginning to look like a beautiful spring around here, even if it is still a bit cool. Get out of the house and try to enjoy the outdoors.

And if you really feel like you must, say a “thank you” to whichever god you worship. We tend to find more value in the Gia theory, and believe when the founding fathers of our country talked about “natural rights,” they were thinking more about the laws of nature than the laws of Judge Roy Moore’s Old Testament Ten Commandments.

Think about it…

E.O. Wilson

The natural world is dissolving around us.

Ecologically, environmentally, biologically, things are looking grim.

It is reassuring, then, to know that Dr. Edward O. Wilson, a native of Alabama and widely heralded as one of the greatest scientific minds of the 20th century, is optimistic.

That’s according to an article in the The Idaho Mountain Express.

The Future of Life, Explained

Wilson’s latest book, The Future of Life, combines arguments from biology, economics, ethical philosophy and spirituality to address today’s most pressing environmental issues.

The book opens with a letter to Henry David Thoreau, a man he sees as a forerunner in the conservation spirit. Informing Thoreau of the great changes that have taken place in the natural world since his death, Wilson writes:

“Half of the great tropical forests have been cleared. The last frontiers of the world are effectively gone. Species of plants and animals are disappearing a hundred or more times faster than before the coming of humanity, and as many as half may be gone by the end of this century. An Armageddon is approaching at the beginning of the third millennium. But it is not the cosmic war and fiery collapse of mankind foretold in sacred scripture. It is the wreckage of the planet by an exuberantly plentiful and ingenious humanity.”

Burying Intelligent Design: It’s Intelligent Evolution People

by Glynn Wilson
Editor and Publisher

“Great scientific discoveries are like sunrises. They illuminate first the steeples of the unknown, then its dark hollows.”

Can you guess who wrote these words, and when?

I suspect not, especially if you depend on local newspapers, television news and conservative talk radio for your world view - along with the Bible and your local church.

(Of course the regular readers of The Locust Fork are much brighter than that, and if you are reading this online, do us a favor and print it out and hand it to 10 people who don’t read online. In the interest of illuminating some dark hollows, this is for our new readers in Alabama and especially the local press, which needs a bit of dressing down from time to time - in the interest of trying to make them work harder to fulfil their Constitutional role under the First Amendment).

The joke around the bright end of cyberspace is that making fun of news outlets that rely on cliches such as shooting fish in a barrel to describe their feeble attempts to make us laugh and “call politicians on the carpet” is about as useful as using the print edition of the New Orleans Times-Picayune to soak up the flood from Hurricane Katrina.

In other words, it’s just not going to be enough to get the job done. But we have to start somewhere, so what about here?

An interesting fellow by the name of Edward O. Wilson, a native of Alabama who just happens to be a great scholar at Harvard, wrote that opening line for a new book out on Charles Darwin. (Wait, don’t click away yet. There’s more).

Wilson’s book should be the final say in the so-called culture war between those who want “intelligent design” taught in America’s public schools alongside evolution.

But of course it won’t be the last word, in part because even most of the news reporters in the country are not schooled enough to pass on this bit of scientific law to the lay public in a way that would put the debate to rest once and for all.

And let’s face it, there are few people in the U.S. news business with the courage to pound this argument home in the face of public opinion polls showing that 60 percent of American citizens are so ignorant they believe in the prophecies of the Revelation and half do not believe in evolution at all.

News Flash: The constant debate about “objectivity” in the news business has nothing to do with truth. It has to do with maintaining a 20 percent return on investment for stockholders from the print edition by staying on the good side of the same ignorant souls politicians turn to for their government largess.

Just take a look at the Alabama Legislature where, in the first weeks of the 2006 session, more tax money was spent to debate Bible classes, carving “God Bless America” on state license plates and another attempt to display a new idol to the Ten Commandments in the state Capitol. This would be funny if it were not so pathetic.

Yet the press runs these press releases without the accompanying analysis pointing out to the “folks back home” why this might be a problem.

Church and Statehouse

At least Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley had a passing reference to “telling the truth” and addressing “real problems” in her speech launching her candidacy for governor. But even she is using the issue of “faith” to try making the “leap” into the governor’s mansion.

For the educators in this state and the entire nation, let’s just say what we have here is a failure to communicate.

For in the community of scientists, who rarely come out of the research closet long enough to tell us their views, the expansive influence of the writings of Charles Darwin for the past 150 years “have spread light on the living world and the human condition,” Wilson writes.

In his new book, From So Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin, Wilson makes the case for evolution as a “deceptively simple idea.”

But he, like Darwin, acknowledges that the human species, with all its noble qualities, still bears “the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

If you don’t believe that, take a look around the legislative halls of America today. Former Gov. Fob James’ made a lot of hay a few year’s back with a routine imitating a monkey. But does anyone really doubt that he evolved from one? And what about our dicktater-in-chief in Washington? Anyone doubt he descended from apes?

“Evolution by natural selection means, finally, that the essential qualities of the human mind also evolved autonomously,” Wilson writes. “Humanity was thus born of Earth. However elevated in power over the rest of life, however exalted in self-image, we were descended from animals by the same blind force that created those animals, and we remain a member species of this planet’s biosphere.”

Let there be no more doubt about it.

“The revolution in astronomy begun by Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 proved that Earth is not the center of the universe, nor even the center of the solar system. The revolution begun by Darwin was even more humbling: it showed that humanity is not the center of creation, and not its purpose either.”

Darwin and evolution are so central to understanding modern biology, and the other sciences, that the debate can be summarily dismissed with the famous remark of evolutionary geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky in 1973: “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.”

“Evolution by natural selection is perhaps the only one true law unique to biological systems…and in recent decades it has taken on the solidity of a mathematical theorem,” Wilson writes. “In fact, nothing in science as a whole has been more firmly established by interwoven factual documentation, or more illuminating, than the universal occurrence of biological evolution. Further, few natural processes have been more convincingly explained than evolution by the theory of natural selection.”

Wilson calls American public opinion on this issue “surpassingly strange,” although he says, “Americans are certainly capable of belief, and with rocklike conviction if it originates in religious dogma.”

Most of the religious Right opposes the teaching of evolution in public schools, he says, either by an outright ban on the subject or, at the least, by insisting that it be treated as “only a theory” rather than a “fact.”

“Yet biologists,” he says, “are unanimous in concluding that evolution is a fact.”

The problem for the religious community is that they can never accept the idea of “blind chance” so necessary to understanding how species evolve. Nor can they accept “the absence of divine purpose.” The problem with “intelligent design,” however, is that the reasoning behind it “is not based on evidence but on the lack of it.”

Critics of evolution sometimes try to make the case that scientists resist the “supernatural theory” because it is “counter to their own personal secular beliefs.” What they don’t understand, Wilson argues, is how the reward system in science works.

“Any researcher who can prove the existence of intelligent design within the accepted framework of science will make history and achieve eternal fame,” Wilson writes. “He will prove at last that science and religious dogma are compatible!”

No one has come close, he says, “because unfortunately there is no evidence, no theory and no criteria for proof that even marginally might pass for science.”

According to Wilson, “the only worldview compatible with science’s growing knowledge of the real world and the laws of nature” is “scientific humanism,” which “considers humanity to be a biological species that evolved over millions of years in a biological world, acquiring unprecedented intelligence yet still guided by complex inherited emotions and biased channels of learning.”

In other words, “Human nature exists, and it was self-assembled.”

So can we please stop the Jihad and get on with living and evolving?

For more insight into where we are, check out these gems you won’t find out about in the local press.

Apocalyptic Vision From Jerusalem to the White House

Chomsky Says There Is No ‘War On Terror’

Glynn Wilson is a veteran reporter, free-lance writer and Net publisher who writes at least one column a week under the titles Under the Microscope or Connecting the Dots. His articles have been published in the New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Dallas Morning News and many other newspapers and magazines, and his articles, columns and photos are available for syndication.