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I bet you think this day is about him, don’t you?

It’s Darwin Day!

And it is sort of about him, sorta. It’s not like a Catholic saint’s feast day, or like a day idolizing a Communist revolutionary, or even like gushing over a pop star. It’s a day to recognize the good work one respected scientist did, and to recognize the centrality of an influential hypothesis that he pioneered, while still recognizing his flaws.

It’s not like we can get excited about one grand unifying principle on one particular day. After all, every day is evolution day, so Charles Darwin is just a nice focus point to justify a party.

A little good news » « Discovery Institute ♥ Joe Rogan & Bret Weinstein

Comments

  2. Bruce says

    This day in 1809 is also the birthday of Abraham Lincoln.
    What’s the difference between Darwin and Lincoln? Only Lincoln got fan mail from Karl Marx.

  3. larpar says

    From the link – “Local and state governments will close in commemoration of the Day,”
    Where? Not here (NE Iowa) for sure.

  4. Hemidactylus says

    It should also be about Goethe/Owen and Wright/Kimura/Ohta. Ohno/Gould/Vrba too. Pluralism sensu Gould is too woke now.

    I’m kinda fond of niche construction, but EES is a bit of a polemicized stretch. Epigenetics seems too hyped up too.

  6. Hemidactylus says

    He’s a can of worms, but I kinda like Huxley’s deflation of evolutionary ethics running counter to Spencer.

    His grandsons were a bit of a hot mess when it came to eugenics. Aldous was a psychedelic pioneer and Julian a proponent of the modern synthesis and forerunner of memetics (not something to honor him for especially given the inspiration from a certain Jesuit paleontologist who dabbled in orthogenesis).

  10. Pierce R. Butler says

    Bruce @ # 2: Only Lincoln got fan mail from Karl Marx.

    Apparently the story about Darwin declining Marx’s offer to dedicate Das Kapital to him has been debunked, but –

    ‘Amusing insight’ revealed in Marx’s ‘Das Kapital’ gift to Darwin

    Karl Marx once gifted a signed copy of “Das Kapital” to scientist Charles Darwin, but the book remained largely unread, providing an “amusing insight” into the dynamics between these two intellectuals, according to experts. …

    Marx sent the book to Darwin in June 1873, with the inscription “on the part of his sincere admirer, Karl Marx.” However, the gift “appears not to have been very well received,” said English Heritage, the charity responsible for maintaining Darwin’s residence, Down House, in a statement Thursday.

    “With most of its pages remaining uncut, it seems Darwin gave up any attempt to read it,” reads the statement, which adds that Darwin took almost three months to send a dry note of thanks to Marx.

  11. birgerjohansson says

    In a certain film a character says “Life will find a way”. It is time for life to find a way to make bird flu very dangerous for viewers of Fox News. I cannot specify the exact mechanism, maybe targeting athrophied brain cells once used for imagination?

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