Mr and Mrs Charles Darwin

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mr-mrs-darwinCharles and Emma Darwin never were able to see eye-to-eye on God
 by Deborah Heiligman
Los Angeles Times (Op-Ed), p. A19.
January 29, 2009

On January 29, 1839, in the little chapel in the English village of Maer, a religious, 30-year-old woman named Emma Wedgwood put on a green silk dress and got married. She believed firmly in a heaven and a hell. And she believed you had to accept God to go to heaven. She married Charles Darwin.

As we head into a new era for a country that has struggled for too long with the marriage of science and religion, we should take a look at the marriage of Charles and Emma Darwin.

When Charles came home in 1836 from his five-year voyage around the world, which included the visit to the Galapagos Islands, he was already seeing life and creation in a new way. And as he courted Emma, he also was secretly scribbling notes about a new idea, his theory of evolution, in leather-bound notebooks marked “private.”

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UK Atheist Bus Campaign In Full Swing

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uk-atheist-busIs God On The Bus? Advertisers Believe He Probably Isn’t
The Journal (United Kingdom), p. 7.
January 7,  2009

ADVERTS declaring “there’s probably no God” have been placed on 55 buses around Newcastle after an unprecedented fundraising campaign.

A total of 200 bendy buses in London and 600 buses across England, Scotland and Wales will carry the slogan following a fundraising drive which raised more than £140,000.

They feature lines doubting the existence of God, and celebrating the natural world, written by Albert Einstein, Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Adams and Emily Dickinson.

It is the first atheist advertising campaign in Britain, and similar adverts are running on public transport in America and Spain.

Ariane Sherine, a writer who first thought of the bus adverts, said: “You wait ages for an atheist bus, then 800 come along at once. I hope they will brighten people’s days and make them smile on their way to work.”

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Turkish Parliament Interested in Noah’s Ark Landing Site

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Neues von der Arche Noah
by Michael Stürmer
Die Welt (Germany), p. 1.
January 7, 2009
Das türkische Parlament glaubt zu wissen, an welchem Berg sie wirklich landete

Dass Schiffe an Bergspitzen festmachen, ist ungewöhnlich, aber es wird davon berichtet. Ruf und Ruhm des Berges Ararat im äußersten Osten der Türkei beruhen auf solcher heiligen Überlieferung, jedenfalls für Juden und Christen. Er gilt als Landeplatz der Arche Noah. Die Gläubigen des Korans dagegen wollen wissen, dass das am Berg Cudi geschah. Der liegt ebenfalls auf türkischem Boden. Ein Untersuchungsausschuss des türkischen Parlaments hat jetzt die islamische Version in einem Bericht neu gewürdigt. Der Bericht von der Sintflut, die der Allmächtige über die sündhafte Menschheit verhängte, beginnt mit der Sammlung aller Lebewesen, jeweils ein Paar, und endet mit der Taube, die Noah aussendet, die Wasserflächen zu erkunden. Nach einem ersten, vergeblichen Versuch kehrte die Taube mit einem Olivenzweig zurück. Doch wohin? Wo die Arche anlandete, die in alten Kupferstichen nicht als hochseegängiges Transportschiff dargestellt wird, sondern wie eine Fähre, ist tatsächlich umstritten. Abschließende, wissenschaftlich belastbare Beweise wurden bisher nicht gefunden. Wenn es die Sintflut gegeben hat, und viele Legenden berichten von gewaltigen Fluten, dann hat es auch Versuche der Rettung gegeben. Warum Gott allerdings geglaubt haben sollte, die Menschheit solchermaßen zu verbessern, bleibt ungeklärt.

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Ota Benga and Benjamin Button

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OtaBengaBasest Instinct
by Ann Hornaday
The Washington Post, p. C1.
January 3, 2009

It’s not unusual for a minor, obscure historical figure suddenly to bubble up into the zeitgeist. (Remember the year of two Truman Capote movies?) But the inspiration for what might be the most arcane cultural reference of 2008 turned out to have particular, grievous resonance for me. His name is Ota Benga. If you saw the wildly imaginative movie “The Fall” in the spring, you might recognize the name. The film, directed by Tarsem Singh, featured a former slave named Otta Benga as one of its larger-than-life fictional heroes. Then, in September, Texas venture capitalist Bill Perkins took out an ad in the New York Times criticizing the financial bailout; the full-page illustration was designed by a Houston-based art collective called Otabenga Jones. Ota Benga has inspired musicians, including the Brooklyn experimental band Piñataland. Someone has set up a MySpace page in his name.

But nowhere has Ota Benga been more obviously referenced than in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” in which an African Pygmy befriends the title character, a young man in an old man’s body. While the two explore the racier pleasures that New Orleans has to offer, the Pygmy — in the film he’s called Ngunda Oti — cheerfully tells Benjamin of his various adventures, which happen to include being put in a zoo and exhibited in the monkey house.

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Darwin’s Plagiarism of Alfred Wallace Under Study

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Interestingly enough, some creationists are contending that Darwin did not plagiarize Wallace or other contemporary scientists. Todd Wood in Natural Selection—Theory or Reality?, and in a yet to be published Answers Research Journal article, “There Is No Darwin Conspiracy,” dismisses all such accusations against Darwin.

Hhmmm…

Origin of Darwin’s theory in dispute
by Jack Grimston
The Australian (Australia), p. 7.
29 December 29, 2008

AS the scientific world prepares to mark Charles Darwin’s bicentenary, the author of On the Origin of Species is facing accusations of plagiarism and unjustly claiming credit as the father of evolutionary theory.

One group of critics has commissioned computer experts with specialised anti-plagiarism software to scour Darwin’s book, published in 1859, for similarities to a paper released the year before by Alfred Russel Wallace, a naturalist who worked for eight years in what he termed the Malay Archipelago — primarily Indonesia and Malaysia.

Initial indications are that the analysis will show some of the most important ideas in On the Origin of Species were taken from Wallace — in particular the idea that species with variations helping them to survive would thrive and pass on these features to their offspring.

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The Importance of Darwin

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How important was Charles Darwin, and what is his legacy today?
The Independent (United Kingdom), p. 34.
December 30, 2008

Why are we asking this now?

From the back of a £10 note to the awards in his name that celebrate those who remove themselves from the gene pool by dying in foolish ways, Charles Darwin’s legacy is everywhere. He has been on more stamps than anyone save members of the royal family, and yesterday the Royal Mail unveiled another one, to celebrate 2009 as the 200th anniversary of his birth, and the 150th of the publication of his landmark work, The Origin of Species. But that’s not the only way the occasion is being marked, and Darwin’s influence is felt in far more profound ways than his popular cultural contributions to this day.

Why were Darwin’s ideas so important?

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BBC Planning TV and Radio Darwin Celebration Documentaries

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The 3-part BBC TV series, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, is being co-produced by the UK’s Open University.

TV
by Tom Sutcliffe
The Independent – Arts & Books (United Kingdom), p. 8.
January 2, 2009

…
Likeliest to deliver intellectual satisfaction is the BBC’s multi-network celebration of the bicentenary of Charles Darwin’s birth, which will include a David Attenborough special, Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, and a three-part series provisionally entitled Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. There will also be documentaries on the rise of Creationism, a “landmark” natural history series for BBC1 and Jimmy Doherty in In Darwin’s Garden, in which the Corporation’s favourite farmer recreates some of Darwin’s experiments.
…
The big non-musical anniversaries are both to do with Charles Darwin, who was born on 12 February 1809, and published On the Origin of Species in 1859.

A whole year wouldn’t be enough to explore the difference he made to the way we see our place in the world – evolution being what the American philosopher Daniel Dennett called a “universal acid”, dissolving everything it touches – but Radio 3 and 4 are both promising to make a start.

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Canadian Christian Financed Expelled

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NO APOLOGIES
by Douglas Todd
The Vancouver Sun (Canada), p. C1
January 3, 2009

Canadian Christian documentary producer wanted to generate anger with polarizing attack on Darwinism

It’s hard to reconcile such a presentable, intelligent and Christian man with such an incendiary movie. Walt Ruloff, a 44-year-old Canadian high-tech mogul, was explaining why he came up with the idea to finance Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed.

He told the stories over lunch in a sun-filled restaurant on Bowen Island, where his family lives in a mansion once incorrectly reported to be the home of Hollywood actor Harrison Ford.

Ruloff readily admitted Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed provoked rage in many quarters when it was released across the continent this year. And he knows it will continue to rile some now that it’s come out in DVD.

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