Charles Darwin is 200 years old today! Celebrate by visiting the monkeys at the zoo or curl up at home with a steaming hot bowl of primordial soup. I guess this is kind of a bigger deal in England, where Darwin was from. In the U.S. he's a little more controversial because Biblical literalism has a larger following here. People tend to wrongly believe that he invented evolution, actually as a concept it had been brewing for some time by his day, he just observed and deduced the mechanism by which it worked: that is, natural selection, which basically states that creatures better suited to their environment tend to live longer and thus reproduce more (basic cause-and-effect, a hard concept to swallow, I know). :-)
Today is also Lincoln's 200th birthday, but I figured he would be getting plenty of press today already, so I gotta plug for my lesser-sung scientific heroes. ;-)
No comments:
Post a Comment