Happy birthday Charles Darwin
Image source: philadelphia-reflections.com
Born on 12 February 1809, today is Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday. I commemorated the event by purchasing a copy of On the Origin of the Species at the weekend, and I’ve also been lapping up the media coverage surrounding the anniversary over the last week or so. There is a provocative piece in The Australian today arguing that the Right should warm to Darwin, but my personal favourite is the one that appeared in the Tehran Times yesterday (the link is broken at the moment but it also appears here) which insists “Darwinism is the root of terrorism”. Harun Yahya, is a prominent Islamic creationist who maintains that atheism “is active right across the world, hurting and literally damning people” and it is Darwinism — “the foundation of godlessness, of all atheist ideologies” — that is the source of all these troubles. Employing this logic, he would presumably have no objection to the position taken by Christian creationists. Never let science get in the way of a good story I suppose.
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